Google Attaching Subdomain to URLs

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Google Attaching Subdomain to URLs

Google is attaching a subdomain to my regular URLs

azlinda

4:36 pm on Apr 6, 2019 (gmt 0)

I did a search for one of my unique pages on Google just now. I can't believe what I found! Instead of the URL being [domain.com...] it was listed as
[mail.domain.com...] When I clicked on it, I got this notice: Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue.

What is going on?

I performed the same search on Yahoo, and the correct URL came up. None of the other search engines are doing this.

robzilla

6:48 pm on Apr 6, 2019 (gmt 0)

Sounds like a misconfigured web server that's serving your site from multiple subdomains. If it's HTTPS then you may not have a valid certificate for the subdomain so the browser throws an error, but Googlebot might ignore it. Solution: re-configure the server to serve the site only from domain.com (mail.domain.com probably should not be listening on ports 80/443 anyway) and/or set up 301 redirects to the proper URLs (i.e. if domain is not example.com, redirect to example.com.) This is also a good reason to use rel=canonical.

(This is the AdSense forum, by the way.)

azlinda

8:06 pm on Apr 6, 2019 (gmt 0)

Thank you, robzilla. I have a valid SSL certificate which I bought from GoDaddy. Strange thing is that I just checked the same URL on Google search again, and it is showing up properly this time!

robzilla

8:20 pm on Apr 6, 2019 (gmt 0)

If it's a wildcard certificate then I'm not sure why you'd get the "Potential Security Issue" message. Most sites just have a certificate for example.com and www.example.com, however, and in that case any other subdomain like mail.example.com would not be covered.

Glad it's sorted anyhow!